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Tuesday, 6 February 2007

Any development in alternative or herbal medicine that offers to give palliative comfort, therapeutic cures or prophylactic remedy for the diseases that rage amongst mankind today is very welcome.

I have many a time refused synthetic medicaments that pump the body full of chemicals providing temporary respite to a point that the body can handle no more and the person expires not so much from the illness but from the treatment – but who would own up to that?

Cures for serious pain that then lead to heart attacks, treatments for cancer that leave the person hanging on to a thread of life, in fact, I am convinced that many have not died for the reason that they have a stronger will to live rather than them reacting to the effect of the toxins they have to ingest with side effects, if recounted, would make a Stephen King horror novel look like a kindergarten colouring book.

Herbal clams making me puke

Even so, the big healing, cure or remission people are looking for is one for HIV/AIDS, this has been hitting the headlines faster than I could raise commentary, only last week the President of Gambia suggested he had been curing AIDS with herbs, in people who have been invited to his harem, my views on this were not half derisive, I was enraged.

Now, I read that Iran has also laid claims that it also has a cure for AIDS, a claim that has been out since September 2006 and reported by the Science Daily – this has been further developed to a herbal cure for AIDS or in some cases used in some combination therapy with existing chemical compounds that make up current HIV/AIDS treatments.

Of nuclear herbalists

Iran being a closed country and one with which countries like America has not had any diplomatic relations for 37 years, it is unlikely that we might really get essential corroborative detail of this development just as we cannot ascertain if Iran’s nuclear programme is purely peaceful or has militaristic tendencies.

Now, I would hope that the quest to find a cure is altruistic and compassionate to a larger degree than commercially driven for the benefit of blockbuster inventions and profits that Big Pharma is too indulged in to offer benefit to mankind.

Institutions like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation are also spearheading research sponsorship to develop drugs that impoverished countries and their people need and this is laudable.

A cure or a lure

Concerning Iran, my concern is whether this cure for AIDS is really one that its people should flock to for treatment or it is a lure to encounter the wrath of Sharia Law in the administration of punishment to the extreme.

At least, up till last year a number of teenagers were executed for being homosexual and that raised hackles in the Netherlands when our matronly Minister of Integration had to be forcefully dissuaded from deporting homosexual asylum seekers back to Iran on the whim that she had been assured they would come to no harm.

Thankfully, the young men were saved from the ideology of rule-keeping to the exclusion of commonsense and compassion, we all did breathe a collective sigh of relief.

Numbers to numb some

However, Iranian statistics suggest that most HIV/AIDS sufferers 62.3% are drug addicts who inject drugs and would have been infected through needle sharing, 27.9% have acquired the disease through unknown causes and 7.4% by possible sexual contact.

It would be interesting if checks are first made for needle marks to determine the druggies, background checks to determine the heterosexuals and possibly what is left over might be fit for the mob and the gallows – it does not bear thinking about.

Believing the best

Again, I want to believe the best of this situation, if indeed the Iranians have had a breakthrough on something that has foxed the whole of Western civilization over the last 30 or so years, they have a gift for mankind that far outweighs a prissy little nuclear tiff that is getting America too hot under the collar.

My only other concern about these herbal remedies is after the Gambian President’s announcement, maybe one of the reasons President George W. Bush is against stem cell research funding is because the Crawford Shrub or the Prairie Chapel Flower is being tested as an efficacy against Alzheimer’s disease – you never know.